This invention relates to the front part of an aircraft, also known as the nose, comprising a landing gear housing which houses front landing gear.
The invention applies to all types of aircraft.
The nose of aircraft has been the subject of many developments with a view to optimizing its mass, volume, cost, safety, ease of manufacture, maintenance, etc. Such a nose is for example known from documents FR 2 910 875 and U.S. Pat. No. 7,784,736.
Despite the fact that many designs are in existence the environment of the nose landing gear housing can still be optimized, in particular to assist fitting of the landing gear doors when assembling the nose or during maintenance.
Normally the landing gear housing is defined by three or five stiffened panels. Plates for hinging the doors are attached to the side walls of this landing gear housing, which is itself attached to the fuselage in a well for passage of the landing gear made in the outer skin of the fuselage. After the housing has been mounted on the fuselage an operation of adjusting the positioning of the doors with respect to the well made in the outer skin is carried out so as to reduce the play between that skin and the edges of the doors by as much as possible.
In addition to requiring specific equipment for adjusting the position of the doors, such as wedges associated with the hinge plates for these doors, the centering operation is expensive in terms of cost and time. Sometimes it even requires adjustments to the perimeters of the doors and/or the opening in the outer skin of the fuselage.
There is therefore a need to optimize the design of the environment of the front landing gear housing with a view in particular to assisting adjustment of the doors closing the landing gear housing.